Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Perth the wait

I've got a fantastic view from my hotel room. Sat in the Crowne Plaza in Perth right now, overlooking the Swan river, a big bit of greenery, and the hotel's swimming pool. The weather is glorious and it's twenty to five in the afternoon. Internet access in this room doesn't seem to have a per-megabyte charge associated with it and therefore I'm going to kick off uploading all the photos I took in Auckland, even though an awful lot of them are average and/or very samey. Hopefully some people are big fans of lava and water and big towers.

Domestic flights suck. QF577 saw me spending 5 hours above some extraordinarily boring landscape with no personal video screens, a busted pair of headphones, shit seats, and sat next to a wine guzzling nun. Good on 'em for giving me glass bottles of beer though, especially after my "take advantage of the lounges" philosophy was confounded in Sydney because the alcohol isn't self-service, and the bars weren't opening until 1300. Bah. Managed to finish a book I only bought in Auckland airport on Monday already on the flight too.

First impressions of Perth are embarassing, in that I feel pretty ... sophisticated. Me! I'm obviously being unfair but the experiences so far have been: arrive at the domestic airport, where people were being met directly at the gate, there's no security (or immigration, obviously) and baggage reclaim is landside in a public bit that anyone could wander off the streets and get to; and getting a cab to the hotel driven by a guy who thinks blacks are ruining every city in the world, it's ridiculous that in London "every 10 people are 5 black faces and 5 white faces" walking down Oxford Street (insight courtesy of his London-dwelling daughter), and that they're not content with killing each other and destroying their own countries.

I was very glad his tirade occurred immediately prior to turning into the hotel, where we encounted a guy reversing out of a bit you're not allowed to reverse out of. I'm pretty confident this place can't possibly be a virulently racist city but if it is, well, I'm glad I'm white and from Australia's fatherland.

Only 7 hours in the future now. Think I'll go out and see if I can't find the town centre, something to eat, and some beer.